Improvisation recap

Ollie Weston
Ollie Weston

Lesson time: (0min 49sec)

A recap of the improvising you've worked on so far, using 'Leaving Town' to show how a head, solo, head jazz performance fits together.

Course preview

This lesson is part of the course Exploring Jazz Saxophone: Part 1 - Getting Started
Watch a preview of the full course below.

Lesson transcript:

Lesson Overview: Leaving Town Performance

So that's a performance of Leaving Town, and it ran like this:

  • Structure:
    • Two choruses of the head
    • Four choruses of improvised solo
    • Two choruses of the head to finish

This structure is quite a standard kind of anatomy of a jazz performance.

Written Study

If you want a written study to play, you can play the written solo. It's available as a download to play along with the backing track.

Improvisation Tips

Hopefully, you're ready to start trying to use the blues scale yourself to improvise.

  • There are lots of standard phrases in the written solo for you to borrow.
  • It's totally fine to take little bits that you like, copy them, and put them into your own solo.

Remember to play along with the track, start to enjoy playing the blues, and express yourself!

About the instructor

Ollie Weston
Ollie Weston

Since graduating from the Leeds College of Music (BA Hons) and the Guildhall School of Music (Post Graduate Diploma in Performance), Ollie has built a busy and varied career in music. As a saxophonist he has performed in live and studio settings with artists as diverse as Amy Winehouse, Tim Minchin, Bonobo, Frank Turner, the London Jazz Orchestra, the Hackney Colliery Band, the Ambient Jazz Ensemble and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. He is also the co-leader of the jazz quartet 'Time Is Of The Essence', and composes and arranges material for this and other ensembles. Ollie is active in music education, currently as course leader for the jazz department at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (junior school), where he runs jazz ensembles, big band and theory classes. He has written a series of 'Exploring Jazz' books for Schott Music that are published worldwide and feature on exam syllabuses in the UK. Ollie has also run workshops for Oxford University, Pro Corda Strings and BABSWE, as well as the Guildhall School of Music summer schools. In his Exploring Jazz Saxophone courses, Ollie takes you from getting started right through to soloing confidently over songs and chord sequences, building the improvising skills that put a real jazz player's vocabulary at your fingertips. read more

What's included?

51 lessons (2h 9m)
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